The telecommunications field is expanding as greater emphasis is placed on obtaining and sustaining efficient exchange of information between decision makers. To understand the reasons for this increasing emphasis, complex, often subtle and subjective issues of sociology and economics must be examined. However, the end result is easy to discern. There is an increasing need for providing an efficient system for enhancing the interpersonal telecommunications between those involved in day-to-day decision making.
One substantial growth area involves voice telecommunications systems that provide for the storage, retrieval, forwarding and distribution of audio or voice messages to people participating in a common telecommunications network. In the extreme, the simplest forms of such systems are characterized as telephone answering machines that sequentially store audio messages for subsequent manual or remotely instigated playback. Substantially more complex implementations of such systems provide for the forwarding or effective routing of a particular voice message to a group of people all serviced by a common message storage and retrieval system. This naturally has the advantage of providing for the instant distribution of information in a form that is immediately reviewable simply by the subsequent act of the intended recipients in retrieving the messages.
An additional functionality provided by advanced telecommunications message storage, retrieval and forwarding systems is the provision for recognizing tone-based commands. These systems permit a remote user to respond to command request messages issued by the system with conventional telephone keypad generated tone commands. The command request message issued may state a number of alternate command possibilities, such as requesting the recording and storage of a new message, forwarding a message from one intended recipient to another, and terminating the current command request sequence. Each command request option presented to the recipient is typically associated with a particular keypad number. As is well known, each keypad number generates a distinct tone that is provided onto the telecommunications network. The message system detects and decodes the tone to ascertain the corresponding command request number. Consequently, a limited degree of interactive operation may be realized by the use of such systems.
A number of interrelated problems of practical consequence and substantial human factors importance continue to limit the effective use of such prior art systems. Perhaps principal among these problems is that such systems are typically not intuitively natural to use. Often, tone command selection and issuance must be reserved by the user until after the entire command request message has been issued by the system. This contributes to a slow, somewhat clumsy usage capability that may tend to frustrate the user particularly when the command selection is known by the user prior to the issuance of the command request message.
Another distinct problem in the operation of such systems is commonly referred to as response latency. This relates to the system's response time in procuring the next message from its message storage unit for issue to the user. Response latency may be particularly frustrating to a user since the underlying purpose of the system is to provide fast, efficient voice message storage, forwarding and retrieval. Response latency periods appear to the user as wasted periods of time wherein no usable function is served either by them or on their behalf. Perhaps even more significant is that response latency is an indication of limited throughput in the message retrieval and issuance system. Consequently, the overall responsivity of such systems will typically degrade as the total number of voice messages stored and concurrent usage of the system by multiple users increases.
A further related problem is that advanced prior art systems typically provide only a fixed performance level. However, such systems may be utilized in a wide variety of circumstances where such quantifiable features as voice quality and total message storage capacity may be subject to varying human factors considerations. Unfortunately, such parameters and others are typically fixed and therefore rarely optimized for any particular system installation.
In addition to the foregoing typical problems, which are by no means exhaustive, there are additional real-world concerns relating to the overall system complexity and cost. While not necessarily an exact measure, system complexity provides an indication of system reliability. This issue again touches on the underlying purpose of such systems to provide immediate and therefore always available interpersonal communication capabilities. Limited reliability, of course, will effectively negate these desired capabilities.
System complexity also typically provides an indication of cost. The cost issue is of particular concern in that the system's resources must always be available to potential users in keeping with the underlying immediate access purpose of the system. However, the usage level of such systems, simply in terms of the total time it is actively used, is typically low. Thus, the cost of the system is desirably minimized for the relatively effective use of its cost-equivalent.